Hmm... If carbon fuel deposits are in the subducting seafloor then shouldn't we work on getting those out now, since otherwise they'll just become volcano burps in the future and that energy content would be lost?

Just a thought. There's a reason volcanoes emit those greenhouse gases. Then we could leave other energy deposits in the ground. Or burn them all, I'm not afraid.

I understand that it is a pretty well-supported fact that the ocean floor (no matter where you go) is no older than about 180-220 million years old, implying that the tectonic plates recycle themselves constantly. New ones are created as the old ones move over top of each other.

This seems to imply that ancient subducted plates are still there, trapped in the mantle, like layered pie crust.

I understand that it is a pretty well-supported fact that the ocean floor (no matter where you go) is no older than about 180-220 million years old, implying that the tectonic plates recycle themselves constantly. New ones are created as the old ones move over top of each other.

This seems to imply that ancient subducted plates are still there, trapped in the mantle, like layered pie crust.

Ishkur:This seems to imply that ancient subducted plates are still there, trapped in the mantle, like layered pie crust.

Yup. There's a really interesting article in Nature Geoscience that used those subducted plates (they can be detected using seismic imaging, i.e. listening to how seismic waves travel through the earth) to reconstruct how the western edge of North America evolved from about 145 million years ago to 55 million years ago (when the Rocky Mountains were building).

Although, they're not necessarily like layered pie crust. The ones from the article above piled up near vertically, folded over themselves like strands of wet spaghetti noodles because they were originally subducted very steeply (if they were subucted at a shallow angle, then you'd probably find them layered).

Ed Grubermann:PC LOAD LETTER: This is a basic fact that Creationists can't understand.

And those "Expanding Earth" lunatics.

Um, we occasionally do get hit by rocks from space. It may be a very slow process but Earth is growing. Of course lately (on a grand geological scale) we have been launching lots of stuff into space so now it might be a wash. I don't know if there is any real way to calculate the incoming mass we gain each year vs the outgoing mass of various probes, ravers, satellites, etc...

Um, we occasionally do get hit by rocks from space. It may be a very slow process but Earth is growing. Of course lately (on a grand geological scale) we have been launching lots of stuff into space so now it might be a wash. I don't know if there is any real way to calculate the incoming mass we gain each year vs the outgoing mass of various probes, ravers, satellites, etc...

The weight of outgoing ravers is minimal. All the dancing and the activity boosting,drugs prevent them from getting any kind of fat on them.

Um, we occasionally do get hit by rocks from space. It may be a very slow process but Earth is growing. Of course lately (on a grand geological scale) we have been launching lots of stuff into space so now it might be a wash. I don't know if there is any real way to calculate the incoming mass we gain each year vs the outgoing mass of various probes, ravers, satellites, etc...

How do people dancing to electronic music cause the earth to lose mass?

Um, we occasionally do get hit by rocks from space. It may be a very slow process but Earth is growing. Of course lately (on a grand geological scale) we have been launching lots of stuff into space so now it might be a wash. I don't know if there is any real way to calculate the incoming mass we gain each year vs the outgoing mass of various probes, ravers, satellites, etc...

How do people dancing to electronic music cause the earth to lose mass?